Blog

summer 2023    Two new paintings, “Sky on Earth” and “Song Lines.”

Writing about the first painting: “I live between two open hayfields that catch the light on them at drastic angles at sunset. I focused only on the reflection of the sky on the hay, which is why there is no sky. It is at that time after painting all day that I go for my sunset walks, so I get clear my head of the day’s work in the studio, and let my eyes take in what’s ‘out there,’ (the constantly changing light). Neighbors scold me because it gets dark quicker than what I’d like, trying to extend the day longer. One neighbor tells me he times his martini when he sees me go by, informing me I have been late.

Someone asked me what the name of my style is after seeing “Song Lines.”  I said, “I didn’t know I had one,” adding: “The process I go through is such a mystery to me, a search beyond what I even try to understand anymore, (but just accept), as though I am not the one painting it, another force tells my hands what to do. I can feel good decisions right up from my feet through my body to the brush moving on the canvas. My painting is coming from an entirely new place than even a year ago. I don’t let anyone come and I don’t go out until it’s off the easel, so that I can keep that flow. (A painting is really never ‘done,’ like the monks at the Accademia in Rome who worked on one painting all their lives in tiny cells looking through tiny windows with archways, from landscapes they painted daily. I could easily become that reclusive but I love people too much.” Then he asked me if the way I painted could be called ‘a method.’ He needed a word I could not offer, so I offered the above many words.

 

 

9 May After the icy cold winter, in early spring everything comes into blossom. The mountains, which had been a frozen blue-black all winter,  is fluffier, a little pinker and pale greener day by day now. I can fall up inside the trees in blossom, my feet lifted up to where there is no gravity.

It takes me a long time to make a painting whole. When the parts don’t connect with each other, I search for how I can get them to call to each other. Each painting goes through this lengthy search process. Improvisation sets me free. Once I’ve found the image, in this case everything coming into blossom, it takes weeks to fine-tune it. Much still gets changed/enhanced in this last process. The painting teaches me by the choices my hands make. I have to step out of the way and trust the presence trying to get born each and every painting. There is no habitual seeing; this is a mediation in color.

 

Lew and Lorna Program                          Discussion ideas:   Intro—conversation about Lew and Lorna’s relationship. How did you meet and how aware have you been of each other’s work?  I was the first person Lew met in the Main House at MacDowell Colony when he arrived. I had been picked up...

Lew and I have watched and listened to each other's painting/music since 1972, attending each other's exhibitions and concerts over decades. The idea to compose improvisationally from each other's work Lew jumped on board first. Music moves in a linear way and painting, even though...

Painting has become so much more pleasurable than those days back I tried too hard to get it right. Back then, if I was not enjoying the search, I learned to stop painting and rethink what I was after, and then go right there with...

18th July I was in the barn painting yesterday when yet another thunder storm tipped the sky upside down. Rainfall was more like oversized ocean waves hitting my tiny boat, meaning: I felt so small and helpless. All of a sudden a huge, long-lasting flash...

https://www.strawdogwriters.org/pandemic/heavy-heart...

Once a year the Holyoke Mountain Range turns ruby red for a mere three days. The shape of Mt. Norwottuck  is very hard to draw for me, but I think I am getting better at it. Tomorrow the mountain range will be grey, since the...

The painting began to become interesting when it was moving forward enough that ideas began to freely present themselves. When I am not certain how to move the paint, I look elsewhere on the canvas, trusting that the hand knows. Then I look back and...

at first I was losing all of me to the dramatic down slide; daily hours at the hospital each day will do that. Then I began sliding 2 hours in the studio each day that I was not there. The hours never increased, but at...

Mt. Norwottuck has a very difficult shape where it meets the sky; I have to search for it each time I draw it. Once I get it, the mountain belongs to me. I always end up at the exact same spot, after carrying my easel...

Everyday, (weather permitting), I am out in the landscape searching for what color the time of day, throughout the day, would form the drawing. As the clouds and light through the clouds hit the hayfield and trees yesterday, everything was in motion all the time....

The sun just did not want to set. Just as the bottom of it touched the top pf the ocean, it squealed with delight, lighting up the thick clouds just above to vermillion. God pulled the sun down further into the ocean whether or not...

It is easier for me to draw ocean waves than to get the shape of Mt. Norwottuck, which I have drawn so many hundreds of times that you'd think it would get easier. The mountain sits right up against the...

The long dark shadows of late summer are heavier than the airiness of the going into summer. I went after the light in the trees, on open hay fields, on the mountains, and in the sky. I fall more in love with what oil paint...

file:///Users/lorna/Desktop/cape/Fowler.webarchive http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/residency-programs-dune-shacks-of-the-peaked-hill-bars-historic-district.htm and: http://www.thecompact.org/index.html 28 April 2013 A one-week artists’ C-Scape Grant Award to reside in a shack without electricity or running water, bound by the Atlantic ocean in the Dunes of Provincetown, MA, was offered to me the last week of April 2013. Artists who are not awarded a...

  Only once a year does the Holyoke Mountain Range turn that ruby red that I so love to draw. But now I have to accept the turning of the season that flips the mountains back into their burnished siennas and umber-oranges.  The winds and rains...

I am painting much better than a few weeks ago when I spent most the time scraping back down to surface at the end of each day. I was trying to paint the lava flow of 100 square miles, 40 feet deep, from Malpais,...

Leaving the lush yellow-green beginnings of spring for the New Mexico desert brought enormous challenges. After long travel, including a 7 hour flight, (haggling with the car rental agency employer about the ‘toy’ matchbox compact car’ offered me, of which I could not see the...

Good painting comes from the pure pleasure of touching paint and moving it with brushes and pallet knives, mixing it to the exact color range of cools and warms. (I was unable to touch paint for a few months even though I was always drawing....

One has to be a very healthy, strong person to 'just hold tight' while listening to branches crashing onto the side of the house, then thumping heavily onto the earth, one branch after the other, not knowing if a window would be hit or the...

My least favorite job is building stretchers. The corners have to be exactly right-angled and there are 6 paintings to build. I got three corners perfect and then one is off. I fix that one and the others are off. Finally all corners are...

The sky got really so dark that I could not see color, late afternoon. By sunset the heavy rain had stopped and I was able to go for my usual sunset walk. Upon my return, I ran back into the barn to look at...

"Yesterday we walked between rainstorms along the shores of Goats Neck Beach and then Wrights Beach. I loved one beach right after the other. Goat’s has the mouth of the Russian River running into the ocean. Birds float on it’s current like little kids going...

Mid-day was warm enough, but then as the sun suddenly dropped at 4pm, coldness set in quickly before I was finished drawing, crayons dropping from frozen fingers that did not even seem to belong to me.  I never quite remember the light being as sharp...

At 4:40 am when I got up to get ready for bed, (having fallen asleep dressed), I heard the first birdsong of the morning: one crystal clear 'full-sentence' undulating melody. Within minutes came a myriad of call-and response songs from all sides of my house...

The staff at the Funeral Home is beginning to look like relatives. I hope we don't have to return for a good long while yet. My sister pointed to where I have a plot; she said she'd 'be right next to me,' to which I...

The way I work, one painting begets the one yet to come. The paintings grow out of each other. My paintings come from the things around me that I see, such as ancient mountains, (the...

“In Northampton some one went around lighting houses on fire while people slept around Christmas time, one right after the other. People died, and some lost their houses. Everyone was so nervous to sleep at night, but the arsonist was caught and confessed. The community...

Painting and Life Writings "My introduction to Jim Gahagan came as an undergraduate student of his at Pratt Institute in the 60's. I was also studying realist painting under Lennart Anderson at the Art Students League. I felt frustrated because something in me was not getting...

I only know winter is here because I succumbed to unpacking my Jeep of my portable outdoor studio, (drawing boards, two easels, stacks of oil crayons, paper, and recycled frames for new drawings). Three days in a row I set my easel up, only to...

I took students of mine to the Smith College Art Museum. One of the paintings I talked about the longest time is Monet's 'Poppy Fields,' forgetting even that the students were there. As I studied the painting, I made discoveries in this same painting I...

South Africa has a most perfect balance of beauty and danger, (to the extremes of both), coupled with an imbalance between wealth and poverty, where anti-apartheid is still new, so society continues to act it out in subtle ways. For example, late this afternoon I...

South Africa has a most perfect balance of beauty and danger, (to the extremes of both), coupled with an imbalance between wealth and poverty, where anti-apartheid is still new, so society continues to act it out in subtle ways. For example, late this afternoon I...